Sophia Ryder bided her time in the closet and waited for the right moment to come out.
It was a high-stakes assignment requiring discretion, stealth, and the precise application of force … but that came with the territory. Templars were specifically trained for just these sorts of missions.
No emotions. Just brutal efficiency.
After a quick review of the schematics and hacked security camera feeds of the mansion via a small holographic projection from her gauntlet, Sophie had used her uniform’s magitech to run a program to remotely disable the building’s alarm system. To reach her present location in this hallway closet she was hiding in, she had knocked the guard at the back of the mansion unconscious, activated the stealth mode of her uniform, and snuck into through one of the back doors.
It would take the other guards only a few minutes to notice either the disabled alarms or their unresponsive colleague, but she wasn’t worried about that.
She had God on her side. The brightest light guiding her in the darkness of night.
She adjusted her hood, then froze. She heard two voices on the other side of the door, walking down the hall.
“Okay, hear me out, right?” one of them said, their voice squeaky and fast-paced. “You have to go in with a strategy. You can’t just, say, walk into Lady Luck Casino and expect Lady Luck herself to be on your side. It doesn’t fuckin’ work like that. It’s the same with pickin’ up chicks.”
“Yeah?” the other one chuckled, with a much lower and slower voice. “And how’s that workin’ out for ya?”
“Fuckin’ fantastically, thank you very much.”
“Does the wife know you’re doing this?”
“She don’t hafta know shit, ‘cause I’m a fuckin’ master at this! I scored three chicks this week alone.”
“… Huh.”
“Jealous?”
Sophie rolled her eyes. Philanderers.
She waited until the footsteps of the two guards approached the closet door before kicking it open. The wooden door immediately slammed into the taller guard’s face, who clutched his broken nose in agony. His smaller squeaky-voiced companion was caught completely by surprise. Sophie swiftly took advantage of his momentary confusion.
As the guard reached for his gun, Sophie unsheathed her magitech scimitar in a shower of cyan sparks and slashed across his throat in an instant. The philanderer’s divine punishment was swift. He grabbed at his throat in horror, sputtering blood and staring at Sophie’s masked face with wide-open eyes, before collapsing to the ground.
Meanwhile the taller guard, having gotten his bearings, grabbed Sophie from behind and put her into a headlock as he attempted to disarm her. She stomped on his foot, hard, and stabbed him in the side with the scimitar, which was enough pain for the big thug to release her. She turned around, swinging the pommel of the magical sword in an arc as she did so, until it collided with the side of his skull with a crunch. He dropped immediately like a sack of potatoes.
Three guards down, one to go, according to the camera feeds.
The last one was easy. She encountered him at the top of the stairs just before she could make her way down the upstairs hallway. Despite having to fend off a few blows with the hologram shields of her gauntlets, she swept her leg to topple the guard. With a single kick to the jaw while he was prone, she sent him flying down the stairs before his cranium made a dent in one of the walls next to the landing. After a couple of twitches, the guard was completely still.
Hmm. That was a bit much. She underestimated her own strength sometimes.
No time to dwell on that. She had a target to pursue.
Prey to hunt.
The intrusive thought made her shudder. It was becoming harder and harder to suppress her instincts on missions. How much more must she purify herself? How much effort on her part would it take to appease God so He might rid her of these sinful urges forever? Why won’t they just go away?
She can’t disappoint the bishop. She can’t. She can’t have him tighten his leash on her any further. She can’t ever, ever give him reason to … to …
Focus, she told herself. Deep breaths. Trust the Lord’s will. No emotions. Just listen to the Lord, your Shepherd. His light is with you always.
Even if she can’t always feel His warmth. Even in the coldest, darkest of nights like this one.
She hoped, anyway. It was getting harder every day. But it was all she could do.
Down the hall. Tip-toes. Soft and silent.
Sophie reached the door she had been looking for. She held one gauntlet up to the door’s magitech sensor, and both of their runes pulsed cyan for a second before a click let her know she was in. No more defenses now.
She steeled herself with a deep breath, then opened the door. It wasn’t enough—nothing could have prepared her for the scene in front of her.
The room had no windows, being located squarely in the center of the mansion. It was dimly lit, and the soft glow of the lamps revealed the perimeter of the room was covered in wall-to-wall wood paneling, faded wallpaper, and large portrait paintings of people from ages long before the Supreme Church was formed. All of the furniture—the ornate desk, the bookshelf, the liquor cabinet—was dark, dark mahogany and expensive brown leather, which faded into the shadows of the room. Clearly the room’s owner was obsessed with the appearance of wealth and power.
And speaking of. The owner of the mansion was right there and turned around to look at her, as Sophie had expected.
What she hadn’t expected was to catch him with his pants pulled down, holding down the wrists of a terrified woman in a hiked-up red dress, as she was forced to lay on top of the desk and struggled to free herself from his grip.
This short mustachioed slimy-looking man in an ill-fitting suit was Kurtis Mandrake, more commonly known in the criminal underworld as “Snake” Mandrake, the current boss of the Mandrake crime family. And from the Church’s files on him Sophie had researched before this mission, the woman with a black-haired bob cut, pearl necklace, and bold red lipstick he was presently attempting to assault was his gun moll, his current girlfriend Cecilia “Cece” Dunaway.
“What the fuck!?” Snake yelled. He took his hands off of Cece’s wrists and scrambled to pull up his pants with one hand, while tapping on the magitech implant behind his ear frantically. Sophie pointed her curved sword directly at Snake and narrowed her hazel eyes, the only part he could see between her hood and her mask.
“That’s not going to work, Mandrake,” she said. “I jammed your neural implant’s communicator before I set foot in here. No one’s coming to save you.”
“You’re … you’re a fuckin’ templar … Oh fuck! Shit! Shit shit SHIT!”
“Shut up!” Sophie hissed. The man obeyed with a gulp.
Keeping her sword trained on Snake, she looked at Cece. The woman’s mascara streaked down her face in muddy dark watercolor from her tears. She sniffled and pulled her dress down, half-embarrassed and half-shocked. She looked scared of Sophie, but almost … relieved? She was trapped in a burning building and Sophie was a firefighter busting in.
“Leave. Now. Out the back. Tell no one what you saw tonight,” Sophie ordered.
Cece nodded, and hurried behind Sophie and out the door, her high heels clacking down the hallway and stairs (with a momentary gasp at one point, probably from seeing the unconscious guard on the landing) until neither of them could hear her anymore.
Sophie closed the door and locked it. The crime boss had barely managed to pull his pants up, but was struggling with the buckle as his hands were sweaty and shaking. Once he saw that her attention had turned back to him, he put his hands up, which caused his pants to drop again.
“H-hey!” Snake said. “W-w-we can talk about this!”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“What do you want? Money? Drugs? Implants? I-I’m a powerful man, I’ve got connections, doll.”
“I’ve seen how you treat your dolls,” Sophie scowled. “I’m not one of your toys, Mandrake.”
“I’ll get out of the city! I’ll never come back to Abraxas!”
“The Church cannot risk that. Direct orders from Archbishop Steele himself.”
Upon mention of the archbishop’s name, Snake’s face went white as a ghost.
“… Fuck! I knew it—I knew he was coming for me! I take it all back, I won’t tell anyone what he did, I swear!”
Coming for him? Telling people what the archbishop did?
Strange. She’d ask Bishop Ironside about it in the mission debrief.
“You must answer for your sins, Mandrake.” Sophie stepped closer to her target, the blade of her scimitar glowing cyan and coming dangerously close to his throat.
“P-P-Please! Please don’t kill me! I don’t wanna die!” Snake blubbered. Tears fell from his eyes onto the rug below.
It was so delicious to see her prey beg for his life.
Stop.
Not now.
…
… But maybe.
Just this once. It won’t leave this room. No one will know except him.
And her cowering quarry doesn’t have much time left anyway.
“You know …” Sophie said, lowering her hood and mask so he could see her face, “… we usually think of snakes as predator animals.”
The sweaty mustached man looked at her, confused. Sophie ignored him and continued.
“But actually, they can be prey too. We just don’t think of them as such, because of how scary they appear to be. Mongooses will fight them head on, and some species of owls will swoop in and snatch them with their talons from above.”
“… Wh-what the fuck are you talking about, you crazy bitch?” he said.
“Even some species of big cats have been known to—” She stabbed her sword into the top of the desk, far enough out of his reach, causing Snake to flinch. “—sink their claws into a snake every now and then.”
Sophie towered over Snake, somehow taller, somehow bigger than when she entered the room.
She grinned down at him.
… A hungry grin.
A grin that showed off something that hadn’t been there a minute ago—
Long.
Sharp.
Fangs.
“Wait, no!” It started to dawn on Snake precisely what this powerful woman who loomed over him actually was. “No, you can’t be! You’re a paladin! You—ACK!”
Sophie grabbed the greasy man by the throat and raised him into the air with one clawed hand until he was eye level, his feet dangling, his pants around his ankles, and his hands struggling to free himself from her vice grip.
She could feel herself getting bigger. Stronger. The changes to her body didn’t hurt at all—she felt like she was stretching after being confined in a small cramped space. Her growing muscles strained against her catsuit, but the magitech kept it from ripping at the seams.
The power was absolutely intoxicating. Her worry of losing complete control was the only thing holding her back from going all the way.
The edges of her auburn hair blended into orange and white fur, and black stripes appeared on her face. The warm breath from her half-formed feline muzzle made Snake’s mustache twitch. Sophie could smell his fear—bittersweet—and it lit up her brain like she had snorted a line of cocaine instead of the scent of his terror.
The thrill of the hunt, of captured prey, was a drug. And she was relapsing.
“And do you know, Snake,” she asked, “what the biggest and most fearsome big cat of all is?”
Her hazel orbs stared back at his own watering eyes, her cursed visage reflecting back at her, filtered and distorted by his tears of contrition, insufficient to save his sinful soul.
If she was meant to be cursed by God for an original sin beyond her control … she could at least use it to exact divine punishment in His name.
She leaned in close to him and whispered the answer to her question—the name of the predator who would seal his fate.
“… The tiger.”
Snake screamed.
And screamed.
And screamed.
Until he could scream no more.
It was over.
Sophie wiped the blood from her mouth, shifting back to her human form, and put her mask and hood up once again. She grabbed her scimitar, pulled it out of the desk, sheathed it, and unlocked the door, leaving the body in the room to bleed out on the expensive rug.
Then, she ran away.
Sophie ran down the stairs, out the back door, and through the back garden of the mansion. She leaped over the tall fence in a single bound, and broke into a sprint. Her magitech uniform cloaked her movements in the shadowy dark night. She skulked around to avoid people and cameras, cut through alleyways, climbed the occasional fire escape, ran and jumped across a few rooftops, climbed back down drainpipes, and kept running for as long as she felt she needed.
Once she was safely far enough away, in a random back alley of Abraxas at least twenty or thirty blocks away from the mansion (she didn’t bother to count), hidden from prying eyes or any surveillance cameras, just as a thunderstorm boomed overhead …
… Sophie leaned against a brick wall, sank to the ground, and burst into tears that mixed with the rain pouring down.
Fuck.
Fuck!
She can’t keep doing this. It’s too much.
It’s always too much.
She never asked for this. She never asked to be a templar.
She wanted to believe that God would help her suppress her curse if she joined the paladins. Her family, devout to the Supreme Church, was so damn proud of her when she got accepted to the APA, when she graduated, and especially when she became a templar. She can’t let them down.
Truth is, though, she didn’t do it for them.
And as ashamed as she was to admit it, she didn’t even do it to serve God, be a ‘good guy,’ or rid the world of sin.
She did it to cure herself.
And it wasn’t fucking working.
The sole reason she won’t quit, the only thing keeping her in the templars at all … was Zoe.
Bishop Ironside always threatened that the Church would take Zoe away from her if Sophie didn’t comply. That they would harm Zoe. That something terrible would happen to her beloved little sister, her precious sunshine, someone she would take a bullet for without a moment’s hesitation.
At the same time, she couldn’t keep breaking down like this after every mission. Why couldn’t she just be strong? Strong without having to resort to her curse?
… How did Mac deal with it?
Maybe she should ask her. Up close. So she could reach her hand into her cell …
No.
No, no, no!
Sophie hadn’t been able to get that damned pagan out of her mind all year.
Not since the day Sophie kidnapped her.
Bishop Ironside had ordered it, and she had carried it out as she always did with every mission—with zero emotion and perfect execution. But that woman has been rotting in that jail cell under the academy for a year now, and she still refuses to give them any information, the idiot!
If that heathen could just give the Church some useful information to use, Sophie could finally convince them to let her go, so she could get that … that woman out of her head and calm her damn feelings. Instead, she can’t think straight! And every strong emotion, every burning feeling, was like catnip to the tiger inside.
How much longer can Sophie attempt to keep her emotions out of her missions? Every single assignment the Supreme Church gave her, every sinner’s arrest or punishment she ostensibly carried out in the name of the Lord, every act of violence or kidnapping or murder that Bishop Ironside ordered her to do, only fed the beast inside more and more.
Her missions were just like hunting, and the beast loved to hunt. It wanted to be unleashed. No matter how much bloodshed she committed—thinking surely that this time around it would finally be sated—its hunger only grew stronger each time, a ravenous predator clawing ever harder on the inside of her skull. Her curse made it harder and harder every day to stay cold, to stay devout, to stay focused.
And how could she stay focused anyway, when that heathen talks to her, flirts with her every time she visits?
God above, it was so hard to hide how much Sophie … enjoyed being assigned to visit her cell. How much she looked forward to seeing her beautifully tough face.
How much she yearned for her touch, in quiet moments alone.
Damn it.
Fuck.
Damn it, damn it,DAMN IT ALL TO HELL!
Sophie swung her fist to the side and slammed it hard into the slick rain-soaked brick wall she was sitting against, leaving a sizable dent in it as pieces of brick crumbled to the ground. Even though her hood was keeping her head dry, she just didn’t care anymore. She pulled back her hood and mask and let her auburn hair get soaked.
Sophie looked up at the sky briefly, then looked back down at the dirty pavement of the alley. She wiped her tears from her eyes and held out her hands to feel the rain on her palms.
If God was really listening, he would have struck her down for her blasphemy by now. It would be a blessing from on high. She would welcome his judgment with open arms and a contrite soul. It would rid her of this curse forever.
No one must ever know that she’s a beastess.
Not her family. Not Alex. Not even Zoe.
And especially not Bishop Ironside. The threat of harming Zoe is enough leverage alone for him to control Sophie—like a damned pet on a leash—so she dreaded what horrors he would make her do with actual blackmail on her.
… But just as importantly, no one must ever know how she feels inside.
For all her outward strength, she was weak.
The beast inside was no paper tiger. It lurked and skulked in the corners of her mind day and night, a striped shadow-self that haunted her nightmares, and threatened every day to burst out of the cage of denial and willpower she was constantly constructing around it.
Its claws were stronger than iron will. Its fangs were sharper than the most pointed self-hatred. Its power was uncontrollable, and she was terrified of what would happen if she let it take over.
She couldn’t suppress these urges, these drives, these instincts to hunt.
But perhaps the most terrifying thing of all was the tiger’s most recent fixation. The predator had locked onto one singular desire that threatened to undermine and dissolve all of Sophie’s conscious efforts to be a good templar, a good girl, to make her family proud, to keep her sister safe.
Tears flowed anew. Her breath caught in her throat.
Sophie balled her hands into fists. She brought her knees up, crossed her arms, tucked her head in, and cried so damn hard it hurt.
She couldn’t deny her feelings, nor her hunger, any longer.
… She had a crush on Mac.
Sophia Ryder was falling in love with a beastess, and she hated herself for it.